Prison contraband is like currency. If you've got anything of value, from drugs to cigarettes, you've got something to trade. And if you've got a cell phone, you can keep running your criminal empire. So as prisons crack down on stuff getting smuggled in, inmates have had to find more and more creative ways of doing the smuggling.
Jails around the world have seen everything from contraband-carrying crossbows and hollowed out Bibles, to carrier pigeons and coloring books. All of them have been carefully rigged to carry forbidden items and not get caught. Of course, they all WERE caught - and their creativity (or lack thereof) was displayed for the world to see.
Here are some of the craziest (failed) ways people have tried to smuggle stuff into and out of prisons.
The Most Unbelievable Things Ever Smuggled Into Prison,
Cell Phone Stuffed in a Brick of Weetabix
Guards at a UK prison did a standard check on a box of the popular wheat biscuit cereal Weetabix that a visitor brought in. It was full of vitamins, minerals, and a smuggled cell phone stuffed into the middle.
A Specially Bred Escape Cat
On New Year's Eve 2012, officials at a prison in Brazil spotted a cat with a veritable arsenal of escape tools taped to it. The kitty, which was a familiar fixture in the prison yard, had two saws, two drills, a headset, a memory card, a cell phone, three batteries, and a mobile phone charger all tightly wrapped around it. Brazilian police suspected the inmates had raised the cat themselves, possibly to help prepare for an escape attempt.
Officials at a Russian prison found the same thing - a cat trained to carry cell phones and sneak them into the jail.
Pigeons Trained to Smuggle Phones
Prisoners in southeastern Brazil reportedly bred and raised carrier pigeons, and trained them to fly back to their homes. The birds were smuggled out, and had cell phone parts attached to their backs with a tiny backpack. The phones were meant to be used to coordinate criminal activity on the outside. Then the birds were released to fly back to the jail. At least two made it "home," but were ultimately caught, and the parts were confiscated.
A Coloring Book Full of Drugs
In March 2011, the mother of a prison inmate dissolved the heroin-withdrawl drug Suboxone into a paste, painted it into a coloring book, and sent it off to her son in Cape May, New Jersey. Making it look like a gift, she scribbled "To Daddy" on the book before mailing it. But authorities had already gotten a tip that drugs were being smuggled in drawings, and the book was intercepted, where guards noticed the orange splotches filling in various pictures and tested them. Three prisoners were charged, along with the industrious mother.
The Cell Phone Watch
Lebanon Correctional Institute in Ohio confiscated a real cell phone that looked like an over-sized watch. The kicker is that it was an actual watch that told time, but it could also make calls if the wearer hit a few buttons on the watch face. Watch phones are becoming more and more common as inmates find ways to direct criminal enterprises with smaller and smaller phones.
Phones Taped to Crossbow Bolts and Fired Into Prison
Can't pass your phone over to a prisoner the old-fashioned way? Just get it over the wall - like the industrious Russian supplier who taped phones to arrows and fired them into the prison yard with a crossbow. Tavda resident Cornelius Bazarov was arrested with 18 cell phones, spare batteries, SIM cards, and earpieces - all wrapped on the end of crossbow bolts with gaffer tape. A guard spotted him, sounded the alarm, and he was found in a growth of trees near the prison in central Russia's Sverdlovsk Oblast.
Delicious Banana Full of Heroin
Two women in Malta were caught attempting to smuggle a banana stuffed with a cardboard tube full of heroin into the tiny island's Corradino Correctional Facility. Apparently, they were doing so at the behest of another prisoner, who claimed she was planning to share the drugs with other inmates. The two women were let off the hook, while the inmate was given an extra 11 months in prison.
Potatoes Stuffed with Hashish
Authorities in Tripoli's Tyre Prison have had to deal with a number of attempts to smuggle drugs in via food items. They've confiscated sandwiches, pastries, and fruit - all laden with contraband. And in November 2014, they found a massive quantity of hashish stuffed into potatoes. Calling it a "crafty manner" of smuggling drugs, the 16 potatoes were apparently brought by one Palestinian for another. The smuggler was arrested, but his ingenuity was noted.
Dude Smuggles Himself Out in a Suitcase
A woman was caught trying to sneak her common-law husband out of a prison in Chetumal, Mexico in a suitcase following a conjugal visit. Prison guards checked the bulging, really-hard-to-carry bag of 19-year-old Maria del Mar Arjona. Inside they found inmate Juan Ramirez Tijerina - who was serving 20 years for weapons possession - curled up in the fetal position. Ramirez was sent back to prison, and his lady love was arrested.
Cigarette-Carrying Cockroaches
Long before Orange is the New Black featured a cockroach trained to smuggle cigarettes, industrious inmates in Amarillo, Texas had figured out how to do it. In 1938, two prisoners in solitary confinement were getting their hands on cigarettes, much to the consternation of the jailer. It took another prisoner snitching to finally reveal the secret - they'd taught a cockroach to carry a smoke and a match on its back and scurry through a crack in the wall leading to the solitary block. The jailer was so impressed by the inmates' ingenuity that he released them from solitary.